Answering the question 'How do you know the one you're with is the one you're meant to be with?'

This year Cathy and I will celebrate our 15 wedding anniversary. That's 'crystal' in case you were wondering. Apparently, we aren't celebrating it by getting a chandelier in our front room. (I've asked.)

I've been asked a few times when I knew that Cathy was 'the one'. I'm not sure I really believe in the idea that there is 'the one' for everybody. But there were a few times when we were first walking out together which gave me clues that we should stick together.

One of the main ones was when I first visited her house away from Uni and discovered she had kept all her Space Lego and Fabuland, with the Fabuland mostly in its original boxes. She even let me play with it (under careful supervision of course!)

I'm not saying I married Cathy for her Fabuland sets, but it was a confirmation that this wonderful person took toys seriously! She could appreciate that I still had most of the accessories from my Action Force and Star Wars figures. She didn't mind that I wanted to collect the entire AF range as an adult, buying the figures I never had as a kid. In fact, many, many trips to boot sales, antique centres and the like prove that she took an active interest.

I had a reminder of the Fabuland moment recently. We've been clearing out the loft in anticipation of fitting insulation and in one of the boxes of Cathy's stuff found a mint copy of the Lego Catalogue from 1986.

I was excited by this as it had two full pages dedicated to the Lego Technic Arctic range. I had the two biggest sets in this range and still have the 6-Wheeled Snow Ranger in near-complete built form.

The mini-bulldozer got broken up for it's pieces, as did the Mountain Rescue Base, although I still have the building instructions and could probably put them back together. Seeing these pictures brings back some good memories of spending most of Christmas Day building the Mountain Rescue Base and using the pneumatics to raise and lower the helicopter lift. It was the first set I had with a pneumatic system in.

Very few people ask me for relationship advice, but I guess the one thing I've learned is to care about the things your other half cares about. That's a measure of how much you love and respect them. That's when you know they may be the one for you.

Muppet Marriage Advice

Cathy has a large number of Christmas CDs, which she often plays to get herself in a Christmassy mood when she's designing Christmas stuff in August. One of her CDs is the soundtrack to The Muppet Christmas Carol.

Listening to it yesterday, I reminded Cathy how back when we were discussing when to get married and whether we could afford it, she said it was like the heartbreaking scene when Scrooge's fiancee breaks off their engagement because he kept putting off the wedding until the "time was right". (Incidentally that scene and song has been cut from recent DVD editions of the film because it's so sad - which is another example of retroactively destroying a good film!)

We decided that the timing would probably never be "perfect", so we ought to go ahead and get married, and I'm glad we did because we faced enough stress in the next few years to tear us apart otherwise. The advice of Kermit et al has never steered us wrong really, and one of the messages of The Muppet Christmas Carol is stop waiting for the "perfect time" - get on and do it, or regret it forever.

Grey hairs

In the queue for a check out at Asda, Cath suddenly scrutinized my hair, saying: "Hey, I think you’ve got some grey hairs here" [prod, prod, just above my ear].
Me: "Okay…"
Cath: "Look!" [yanks a grey hair to show me]
Me: "OW!"
The funny thing was she couldn’t see why I didn’t want her pulling* my grey hairs in the checkout queue at Asda. [*in the interest of matrimonial harmony, I should point out that she refutes the claim that she plucked my grey hair out, although it felt that she certainly pulled it hard enough to tear it out by the roots]

It's not the only time recently that Cath has decided to groom me. A few days ago I was washing up and she decided to pluck a hair that was growing out of my ear, resulting in an interchange not unlike the one above that ended in me similarly going "OW!" I wasn't particularly thrilled by her observation of "Oh, look, it's straw coloured." So, I have blonde ears. So, what?

Now don’t get me wrong - secretly I’m quite glad that after 8 years of being married Cath still wants to pluck me. But if you’re going to pluck, then there’s a time and a place for it. Washing up while somebody plucks you isn't the easiest way to do household chores. And the local supermarket is definitely NOT the place for a quick pluck. Nobody wants to walk into somewhere to do their weekly shop and see couples plucking by the check outs. It's very off-putting.